A
ssimilated Jewish families made a decisive contribution to the culture of
Vienna in its golden age, the age of Theodor Herzl, Sigmund Freud and Gustav
Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stefan Zweig. But who
exactly were those families and what explains the extent of their
contribution? Scholarship in this field, from Robert Wistrich’s The
Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (2006) to Marsha Rozenblit’s Reconstructing
National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I
(2001), has identified essential factors in the creative synergies between
Viennese Jews and the traditional Austro-Catholic elite, including
immigration, secularization, entrepreneurial investment, technical
innovation, educational aspiration and artistic patronage. A further key is
provided by the tailoring accounts of Wilhelm Jungmann & Neffe.

Visitors to Vienna will be familiar with the elegant premises, located near
the Opera. The firm traces its origins back to 1866, when the founder, son
of a Jewish businessman from Hungary, set up a drapery business. Renamed
when Jungmann went into partnership with his nephew in 1873, the flourishing
business became an official supplier to the Habsburg court. After further
changes of ownership, the firm was purchased in 1943 by the
great-grandfather of the present head, Georg Gaugusch.

Looking through the firm’s order books from the 1880s, Gaugusch was not
surprised to encounter the names of aristocratic families as well as members
of the dynasty. Probing a little deeper, he discovered that leading Jewish
citizens featured equally prominently in the tailoring accounts. This
prompted him, while still a student at Vienna’s Technical University, to
begin research into the social background of those customers from a vanished
era, immersing himself in a wealth of archival sources. “Who were they?”
Gaugusch asked himself when contemplating some of the grandiose monuments in
the Jewish section of Vienna’s Central Cemetery. Under the title Wer
einmal war (Who once was), he has provided an answer.

The result is a monumental publication detailing the most prosperous Jewish
families of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the introduction Gaugusch sets
out his criteria for selection, starting with membership of the Jewish
religious community (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde). Families ennobled by the
Emperor for public service are joined on his list by those with which they
intermarried, while other families are included on grounds of intellectual
distinction, or because they were perceived as part of the Jewish “milieu”,
even if they converted to Catholicism. This first volume only covers
surnames from A to K, arranged in alphabetical order, but the list of
distinguished families already fills 1,650 pages. A full index is to be
included in the forthcoming second volume. Meanwhile, the index can be
consulted online under www.genteam.at
and www.jewishfamilies.at.

It was those businessmen, investors, scientists and technicians who enabled
Austria-Hungary to become one of the world’s most productive nations

It was those innnovative businessmen, farsighted investors, gifted scientists
and inventive technicians who enabled Austria-Hungary to become one of the
world’s most economically prosperous and culturally productive nations.
Jewish entrepreneurs developed the railways, financed the coalmines, set up
Pilsner beer production, pioneered sugar refining, consolidated the iron and
steel industries, controlled the leading banks and newspapers, and were
prominent in the leather goods, furniture, clothing and food-processing
trades. Thanks to the painstaking research incorporated in this book, we can
now map those achievements against the names, addresses and lifespans of
specific individuals, whose traces might otherwise have disappeared.

The entry for Hermann Engländer, a silk merchant from Hungary, is particularly
instructive through its documentation of the difficulties Jewish migrants
faced in applying for permission to set up business in Vienna. After twice
being rejected in the early 1840s, Engländer was finally able to make his
move during the more liberal 1850s. In Vienna the family struggled for
commercial success, but it enriched the city culture in other ways through
Hermann’s grandson Richard Engländer, who became a celebrated bohemian
author after changing his name to Peter Altenberg. In the 1890s Altenberg,
who gave his postal address as the Café Central, helped to launch the
literary revival known as Young Vienna.

This invaluable reference work will be mined by historians for generations to
come, although at times the genealogical detail is so dense that the reader
may feel swamped by the wealth of information. However, each entry is
introduced by a succinct account of the significance of the family
concerned, highlighting their commercial or cultural achievements. We are
made aware that they not only handed their accumulated business skills and
financial resources down the generations, but also made lavish donations to
educational and charitable causes. Jewish charities feature prominently on
the list, but the process of acculturation means that we also find generous
support for the construction of new hospitals, art galleries and concert
halls, in addition to the synagogues built in almost every quarter of the
city.

For further information about Jewish patronage, the reader may turn to the
documentation of a more tragic phase in the history of the Viennese Jews, Sophie
Lillie’s Was einmal war: Handbuch der enteigneten Kunstsammlungen Wiens
(What once was: Handbook of the expropriated art collections of Vienna). The
parallel between the two titles suggests that we should consider them as
companion volumes. Lillie’s book, published by Czernin in 2003, is also
alphabetically arranged, listing the Jewish families whose artworks were
seized by the Nazis after the annexation of Austrian in 1938. Many of them
coincide with names that featured in the Jungmann tailoring accounts.

The most striking aspect of Lillie’s list of confiscated artworks is their
extraordinary range, from medieval religious paintings to the early
twentieth-century avant-garde of Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon
Schiele. Typically, the husband and wife in one of those wealthy families
would concentrate their focus on different fields. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and
his wife Adele owed their affluence to the sugar-beet factories set up in
the years following 1867 by Ferdinand’s father, David Bloch. By 1910 their
production methods were so advanced that one of their factories had its own
electricity works, providing power for the whole region. In his succinct
account of the family’s banking interests and landed property, Gaugusch also
alludes to their art collections, referring us in a footnote to Lillie.

Turning to Lillie’s Was einmal war, we learn that Ferdinand
Bloch-Bauer’s passion was for porcelain, while Adele’s more modern tastes
led her around 1905 to join the circle of Gustav Klimt and sit for several
of his portraits. No fewer than five Klimt paintings were on display in
their mansion overlooking the Academy of Arts, together with works by
Waldmüller and Kokoschka. In 1939, the collection was impounded by the
Nazified Austrian authorities, who alleged that Bloch-Bauer was guilty of
financial irregularities (his wife Adele had died a dozen years earlier).
Prize items in the collection, including paintings by Klimt, were then
transferred to the Austrian Gallery in the Belvedere Palace. Sixty years
later, as Lillie notes at the end of her account, the heirs of the
Bloch-Bauers were still litigating with the Republic of Austria for the
return of their family property. (For the concluding phase of this story we
may turn to The Lady in Gold: The extraordinary tale of Gustav Klimt’s
masterpiece, “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” by Anne-Marie O’Connor
(2012). After the Austrian government was pressurized into enacting new
legislation about expropriated artworks, the painting was finally returned
to Adele’s niece Maria Bloch-Bauer Altmann, now a ninety-year-old living in
the United States.) There are scores of other Jewish families whose stories
deserve to be explored in comparable detail. Gaugusch only devotes six pages
to the Ephrussi, whose palatial home still stands on the Ringstrasse near
the Schottentor. But Edmund de Waal has reconstructed, in The
Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), the rich international saga lurking within
the interstices of the biographical record. The pattern that
characteristically emerges from these complicated genealogies is one of
unprecedented achievement culminating in unforeseen disaster. In every case
Gaugusch, assisted by his wife and other dedicated supporters, has done his
best to list the place of death of each person identified. There are
numerous gaps to be filled, but alongside the addresses of leading Viennese
nursing homes we may find Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, or – in the case of
those fortunate enough to escape abroad – London, New York or Buenos Aires.

In addition to the Jewish family networks highlighted by Gaugusch, we need to
take account of the structural transformation of the public sphere which
resulted from the institutions they created: banks and department stores,
newspapers and journals, clinics and consulting rooms, theatre ensembles and
drama schools, literary salons and academic seminars, co-educational schools
and expressive dance studios, art galleries and cinemas, restaurants and
coffee houses, trade unions and workers, educational institutes.

The marginal status of the Jews of Vienna was exceptional

This resulted in a paradox best defined as “empowered marginality”. The
marginal status of ethnic minorities has frequently been discussed by social
scientists, but the situation of the Jews of Vienna was exceptional. Despite
high levels of educational and professional achievement, financial clout and
ennobled status, this sub-group remained outsiders in a predominantly
Catholic society. This placed leading Jewish figures in a position where
they could ask questions with a critical edge or develop initiatives from an
original angle, while building on resources that gave their innovative
projects a firm institutional basis.

Theodor Herzl provides the most compelling example. As literary editor of the
leading daily newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, he was able to bring
his diplomatic contacts into play as he transformed Zionism from a utopian
vision into a dynamic political movement. A similar pattern of empowered
marginality emerged when Mahler became Director of the Vienna Opera House,
Freud created the Psychoanalytical Society, Karl Kraus launched his magazine Die
Fackel, Schoenberg founded the Society for Musical Private Performances,
Bertha Zuckerkandl created her influential salon, Genia Schwarzwald her
pioneering grammar school for girls and Dora Kallmus her celebrated
photographic studio.

Although initiated by members of Jewish families, such institutions should not
be pictured in isolation, as they were open to all the talents –
particularly through informal coffee house circles. The contrast with London
is instructive, for there the coffee houses had been displaced by
gentlemen’s clubs, to which only a self-perpetuating elite was admitted.
During the heyday of British imperialism the links between writers and
politicians were no longer forged in the coffeehouse, but behind closed
doors. Jewish applicants for membership tended to be viewed askance, and
there was no place for sensitive young men who did not share the values of
imperialism, let alone for women who were claiming the right to participate
in public life. The coffee houses of Vienna, by contrast, were open to
all-comers.

Felix Wärndorfer slapped 500 kronen down on the table – and the Wiener
Werkstätte was born

It was around those coffeehouse tables that the two most successful artistic
enterprises of turn-of-the-century Vienna were created. Early in 1903, the
architect Josef Hoffmann was sitting with the designer Koloman Moser in the
Café Hermannshof opposite the Opera, discussing the creation of applied art
workshops similar to those of the English Arts and Crafts movement. There
they were joined by Felix Wärndorfer, a Jewish businessman with a passion
for the work of William Morris. When he heard about their project he
reportedly slapped 500 kronen down on the table – and the Wiener Werkstätte
was born. It proved so successful that in its heyday it had retail outlets
in Berlin and New York, as well as Vienna.

The founding of the Vienna Secession is even better documented, as the
designer Alfred Roller kept minutes of secret meetings held in the Café
Dobner under the leadership of Gustav Klimt, before the launching of this
breakaway artistic group. In addition to the journal Ver Sacrum, they
envisaged the construction of a new exhibition building near the
Ringstrasse. “It all depends on W –”, Roller noted after one of the crucial
discussions. “W –” was the multimillionaire Karl Wittgenstein, and it was
mainly due to his munificence that they succeeded in constructing the
magnificent Secession building, designed by Josef Olbrich, that stands at
the corner of the Friedrichstrasse to this day.

For fuller details of the Wärndorfer and Wittgenstein family networks we shall
have to await the publication of Gaugusch’s second volume, covering L to Z.
However, for the evolution of Viennese Modernism the importance of Jewish
participation and patronage is already clear. Looking back in his memoirs on
the Vienna of his youth, Kokoschka recalled: “Most of my sitters were Jews.
They felt less secure than the rest of the Viennese Establishment, and were
consequently more open to the new and more sensitive to the tensions and
pressures that accompanied the decay of the old order in Austria”.

The evidence, reinforced by the publications of Gaugusch and Lillie, suggests
that it was above all members of the cultivated Jewish bourgeoisie who
enhanced the grandeur of the Ringstrasse, purchased the products of the
Wiener Werkstätte and the Secession, attended Mahler’s and Schoenberg’s
concerts, shopped in the most fashionable stores and had their dreams
analysed by the best man in town.

Edward Timms, Research Professor at the University of Sussex, is the
author of a two-volume study of Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, first
published in 1986. His most recent book is a volume of memoirs, Taking up
the Torch: English institutions, German dialectics and multicultural
commitments, 2011.